I just finished reading Raven’s Peace, by Glynn Stewart, book one of his Peacekeepers of Sol series.

An alien empire that had enslaved countless races and conquered ten thousand stars ran up against the human United Planets Space Force, and lost. It took seventeen years for a coalition of rebels, other alien races, and humanity to defeat the evil empire, but they did it, and now they all need to figure out what they’re doing next.

Colonel Henry Wong didn’t know that he was killing the last of the alien breeding caste when he ordered his command to fire on the enemy ship fleeing the last battle of the war, and when he found out that he’d basically committed genocide he had a bit of a meltdown.

There’s a lot in this book that I like. The setting is really fantastic, for one thing. The crumbling alien empire, the specific ways each faction’s technology is better or worse than everyone else’s, the different hidden agendas at play that never quite breach the surface of the plot–it’s all really good. I especially like the specificity of the different weapons and shielding systems used–the alien energy screens are completely different in behavior than the human grav-shields, and they both use completely different weapons on their ships. It’s great attention to detail. The novel’s idea that it’s humanity’s duty to act as peacekeepers in the galaxy at large is one that makes me nervous, because real history has taught us all too well how close that idea is to naked imperialism, but I can sympathize with the pain of characters trying to do something, anything, to atone for the genocide that they undertook in order to win the war. It’s a good motivation, and an excellent plot.

There are some minor things I didn’t like in the novel, which generally come down to writing style. This might just be the e-book I was reading, but the novel had a bad habit of breaking a single character’s dialogue out onto separate new lines. Usually, that indicates that someone else has started speaking, but it seemed to be used for emphasis here, which really didn’t work for me. Also, the author uses exclamation marks too often, especially in dialogue.

But honestly, while these are obvious sins, they are forgivable ones. I really quite liked this book, and I’m disappointed that I can’t launch directly into reading a sequel.